You can see the kind of "trafficking" carried out on this lawn area - buckets of flowers, coolers of veggies:

The flowers are beautiful!

What about some soft colored crushed pea gravel? Since the area seems to get so much use, the wear and tear may happen every year?

I put in a pea gravel path on the side of our first home with a few large pieces of colorful flagstone. I plan to do it again in this home too.

We first laid out breathable weed fabric , planted shade/sun tolerant vines on the fencing to soften the look and added a few big pots of ornamental grass and annuals in random places. It was a soft grayish stone with hints of peach and pink. It was lovely, not to mention easy to take care of.

Just a thought.

Charlene

Those are lovely flowers, Steve.

You could try a fine fescue blend. The fine fescues - creeping red, hard, chewings - are durable grasses for shady areas. They also require less water and fertilizer than KBG and Turf Type Tall Fescue. They don't take heavy traffic well, however.

Then there are the native and reclaimation grasses. Some are warm season grasses with a limited window of green but very drought hardy. bpgreen and I have gone with wheatgrass which is a cool-season grass, much like KBG and TTTF, and green up earlier and stay green longer in the fall. They use about 40% the amount of water KBG needs and about 1/4 to 1/2 the fertilization.

Dormant seeding over the winter is an option. My cousin use to dormant seed the pastures after Christmas, but we've had so many unseasonable warm winters that he has switched to seeding in late February with really good results the last three or four years. The freeze/thaw cycle helps the native grasses with germination. bpgreen can elaborate better on this than I can because he has done it in his yard.

Pawnee Buttes Grass Guide

Sharp Bros Grass Guide

These links will give you a little info if you are intrigued by the wheatgrasses and others.

Interesting that you should suggest pea gravel, Charlene. This is a very old home (or very old for us Westerners). At one time, this area was a driveway. To the south of the trees, I once put in a flower bed. Kind of a mistake, it was pure pea gravel. Apparently that was what a previous owner decided to use as the driveway surface. Of course, it was a better choice for a future lawn than crushed rock would have been . . . I guess. Not a very good place for snapdragons and such.

Perhaps the pea gravel was only placed in that one area. There's really no evidence of it under the trees.

It seems to me that the real problem with the grass is the shade rather than the traffic. The traffic was worse a few years ago but I didn't notice any real thinning of the lawn until last year. The shade from the trees must have finally reached some intolerable level for the grass. Like a middle-aged man's hair - it is now going fast.

Jaliranchr, it was your conversation with Bpgreen which made me think that there is some lawn expertise here on the forum that I could tap. I actually took a look at wheatgrass before the initial posting and decided that it must have real benefit for high pH soil and of not much help in shade.

Our soil is alkaline but this is a very old residence as I said (over 100 years). Water is fairly cheap and certainly we haven't been very thrifty with it on this ground. It's likely that the pH is quite a bit lower than native soil  which does very well growing Kentucky Blue Grass.

The linked turf grass info is very informative and it looks like fine fescues are the way to go. Unfortunately, the planting date recommendations (late April to late September) are completely outside of the time when we can keep it untrodden. For the next 6 months, we could essentially never set foot on it once.

It's currently a rapidly thinning KBG lawn so I think I'll pick up some fescue seed and organic lawn fertilizer this weekend and weÂll see what it looks like next Spring.

Thanks for the comments on the flowers. It was the cutting garden's last hurrah about 2 or 3 weeks ago. What a haul!

Steve

Dry shade probably is the big reason you lawn thins there.

While fall is the best time of the year to plant cool-season grass seed (weeds aren't as competitive), you can spread some seed in spring, or dormant seed. Since there is some grass there, you can overseed the area. You could do a small section at a time. Maybe an 8 x 8 area, stay off of it, and let it establish itself for two or three months. It would be less of an inconvenience than doing the whole area but the KBG grass you have there would spread and the new seed would fill in. Then you could do another patch in the fall. It might take a couple years to get it all filled in, but that might be an option.

Fine fescue mixes love dry shade. They handle traffic better than a lot of people claim, but KBG and native grasses do handle it much better.

You can try some soybean meal as a fert for the lawn. It spreads like a dream and has 47% protein which converts to about 7 N. You fertilize and add organic matter to the lawn at the same time - that works! :) Try some used coffee grounds too. Good luck!

Shelley

Soybean meal? That sounds good. I wasn't too pleased about having the poultry byproducts out there while we still have a chance or two of a nice warm day.

Shelley, it all looks doable. And, in all honesty, the area is only about 10 by 20. The importance of this small area is that we need that shade for our outdoor work with those flowers and veggies. We have another tree but that valued shade falls mostly on the house. Sometimes, we set up a canopy.

Ah, Summer . . . where has it gone?

Steve

Summer, indeed. I've been mourning its loss for a month now! Just winterized my boat after one last fishing trip on Saturday. The winterizing process is like a sad rite of passage -- at least it was a good fishing trip!

Steve, I knew you were a prolific gardener from your descriptions of how many veggies you grow, but I had no idea you grew that many flowers! And such great color and quality, too! Do you sell these at a local farmers market?

I should grow some of those sunflowers next year. I've been thinking about it for a while. What sunflower varieties do you recommend for a good cutting garden?

Just went back to check if the seed source cited by Emangineer was one that Shelley suggested last Fall and discovered that I'd never seen Steve's note. Sorry, Steve!

Darn, that looks like a lot of flowers even to me - really peak of the season. Yes, they go to the farmers' market. Autumn Beauty mix from Johnny's has been our mainstay for years. I also plant Jokers and maybe 1 or 2 for fun each season. And, also Sunbrights - which are our "big" sunflowers. Of course the Autumn Beauties make quite a tall "hedge" in the garden but the flowers aren't enormous.

You should know that my lawn reseeding efforts in late October weren't very successful. The seed didn't germinate until about a month ago and it seemed to have settled in the slight depressions over the Winter so there's still plenty of ground showing. I reseeded again with KBG/fescue but haven't seen any sign of those seeds sprouting and traffic is beginning to pick up. I can't really stay off the ground much longer . . . .

Now you see why I'm just about to try EmangineerÂs yarrow experiment.

Steve, too